What Is Multichannel Selling? Popular Multichannel Sales Platforms

Multichannel selling is only complete with an omnichannel AI customer service assistant consistent replies to customers across the website, Zalo OA, Messenger and e-commerce marketplaces.

What is multichannel selling?

Marketing online As the economy develops and technology advances, multichannel selling is booming too. Consumers shop online more often. Websites, Zalo and Facebook have all become ideal e-commerce marketplaces. Multichannel selling makes products and services easier for customers to reach.

Today multichannel selling comes in 2 forms: Multi Channel and Omni Channel.

• Multi-channel means selling through both online and offline channels. Sellers can sell in stores, on social media, in phone apps or on their own sales website. More recently, multi-channel has also grown to include online business with the Affiliate Marketingmodel. Multi-channel requires managers to connect the online and offline parts well. In some cases, changes to product information are not synchronized.
• With the Omni channel model, the seller focuses fully on the website, social media, retail points and affiliates, so management is easier. Today Omni-channel is the sales channel that improves the user experience and is used more and more.

Benefits of multichannel selling

Multichannel selling brings many benefits. It suits customers of the 4.0 era and makes it easy to expand your shopping channels. Closing orders, payment and shipping all happen easily. With this model, sellers gain benefits such as:

• More trafficand wider reach to customers. They can buy at any time, from anywhere, and pay in the most flexible way. They can sit in one place and compare the same item across many different stores.
• Customer data is easy to collect and analyze. The business can easily see which products are searched and bought most. Above all, it gets customers' emails, phone numbers and details for use in advertising campaigns.
• The business can sell on many channels. The same item can be sold across channels to reach buyers. Besides benefiting the business, this also improves the user experience.
• Customer loyalty to your products and services is also higher. The brand is easy to recognize, and service quality is rated quickly.

How to make multichannel selling work

Multichannel selling rests on many criteria. Making it work takes a scientific strategy, a good understanding of customer psychology and keeping up with changing tastes. For an effective multichannel strategy, pay attention to these points:

1. Put the customer at the center

Multichannel selling, like any form of customer service, must put the customer at the center. You must aim your service at customer satisfaction. Customer experience is the most important factor in whether you succeed.

Sellers must understand what their customers need and what they expect from the product or service. From there, they can supply, improve and upgrade the product or service. With multichannel selling you have an advantage in analyzing customer behavior and seeing what customers search for, so learning their preferences and needs is simpler.

2. Use technology platforms

Technology is the foundation for growing multichannel sales. With multichannel sales software and tools, you save on marketing costs and analyze data simply. Sales are also easier to manage. All your sales channels feed into one place, so you can reply, analyze, sell and look after customers better.

3. Analyze customer segments

Customers of different ages, personalities, incomes and social status need different goods. You should use Maslow's hierarchy of needs or other customer segmentation software to divide your customer sources into different groups. Then your ads, wording and choice of sales channels will fit better.

4. Personalize

Focus on the right audience when selling across channels. No customer likes generic. They always look for exactly the item they need. Which channels do your customers use most, what do they want, and when are they most active online? Knowing this helps you personalize better in multichannel selling.

5. Don't aim for perfection

Don't aim for perfection and try to cover every one of your online sales channels . Choose the channels that fit your products and advertise there first.

6. Adjust your sales strategy to the moment

Each moment, each event and each social trend calls for different products. You need to catch these shifts and offer the right items. When the opportunity comes, they decide how well you do.

7. Don't take on too much

Taking on too many products, selling on too many channels, operating widely and hoping to spread the brand in a short time… this is a mistake many people make. Grow your multichannel sales on the successes you have already achieved.

Selling on many channels brings a problem few people plan for: messages arrive from the website, Fanpage, Zalo and marketplaces at the same time, each in its own inbox. Staff jumping between them easily miss messages. What many businesses do is use a multichannel AI chatbot that gathers all conversations in one place and replies right on the channel the customer messaged from.

The hottest multichannel selling platforms of 2021

• Facebook is currently the hottest online sales channel. It is easy to manage and reaches a large audience. You can post products for sale in groups, create your own Fanpages, or even sell on your personal Facebook page.
• Selling on Zalo by chatting with and advising customers is also seen as highly effective.
• Multichannel selling on Instagram has also grown strongly lately, especially for beauty-related goods such as fashion and cosmetics.

• Large e-commerce marketplaces such as Lazada, Adayroi, Sendo and Shopee attract a wide variety of sellers. Buyers on these channels are also very active. These marketplaces make advertising easier at a very low ad cost. Foreign marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy and Alibaba are also growing strongly.
• Classified ad sites sell effectively. Items from new to used, from hand-carried goods to handmade, are easy to sell on classified channels. Reputable ones today include chotot.vn, vatgia.vn, otofun.net, 5giay and others.
• Selling on foody, lozi, diadiemanuong and other community review sites.
• Multichannel selling on your website. This channel needs the biggest investment. You will have to build a website, pay attention to product images, SEO services and optimize the web for social media…
• Multichannel selling through the Affiliate business model. You can connect with many partners to sell across channels together.

See also: Tips for selling online on Facebook

What to watch out for in multichannel selling?

1. Reply to customers and answer questions quickly. In any field there are many competitors. When customers buying online get a slow response, they go to other services.
2. Multichannel selling means accepting risk. Above all, be patient in the early stage of selling. After a certain time, once you have a name in the market and many followers, selling gets easier.
3. Understand market needs and judge how society is developing well. The covid-19 situation is still complicated. Multichannel selling is an excellent strategy, but success comes when you choose the right products to sell at this moment.
4. Use multichannel sales management software to sell more effectively. You won't lose much time switching between sales channels. Orders, transactions and replies to customer messages all go into one application. Multichannel selling becomes easier to manage.

Effective multichannel sales management software

1. Mona Media is providing multichannel sales management software effectively. With this software you can connect many sales channels and handle information from several channels at once in one place. Security is high and the app is friendly to managers. Personal information, order processing and chat replies to customers all work well.
2. Haravan multichannel selling has a wide system and suits large businesses. Users can manage sales from the web and social media pages easily. With Haravan you get a solid API to control your business. Big brands such as Juno, AEON and Vinamilk currently choose Haravan for their Omnichannel sales solution.
3. CNV Loyalty is also multichannel sales management software chosen by many businesses. It offers well-organized database management and easy customer engagement through personalized data.

Multichannel selling is one of the fastest-growing sales trends today. However, you do not need to be on every channel to sell effectively. If you do a few channels well, your business will grow steadily. If your business has questions or wants to learn more about multichannel sales platforms, contact us for the most detailed advice, completely free!

Selling on many channels without a central hub quickly turns messy: orders at the marketplace look one way, orders at the fanpage another, and stock counts don't match. A company website is often chosen as the main hub to pull orders from every channel into one place. MONA has online sales solutions for businesses built ready-made with this approach.